


After All It Was a Great Big World

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Character Study, Dialogue Light, Friendship, Gen, Lesbian Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Older Characters, Short & Sweet, Summer, Writing Exercise, just a lot of found family feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-26 15:29:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20932505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: An eighteen-year-old Max looking back from her current summer days to the ones long gone, and knowing that she came out on the other side just fine.-challenge: use the words remember, sunburn, and blush.





	After All It Was a Great Big World

**Author's Note:**

> title from american girl by tom petty and the heartbreakers
> 
> this was written for my best friend so ty kait for always providing prompts tht make me do some of my best writing!!!

**1989**

Max Mayfield has spent eighteen whole years and some change on this earth, and she likes to think they've all been fairly productive. She's picked up a lot, too, bouncing from town to town, meeting all the people she's met. In short, she likes to think herself both smart and fairly wise, but it's the distinction between the two that's most important to her.

For example: she's smart enough to know that she can take Mike Wheeler in a fight. She's wise enough to know to run after she smacks her hand onto his thrumming sunburn.

It's too easy, really. He's sprawled shirtless on his stomach on the basement couch, eyes screwed shut, taking painstaking measures to stay entirely still. Max isn't even sure if he's breathing, but she's always thought his brain doesn't get as much oxygen as it should, so that's no skin off her teeth.

Maybe the hypoxemia is why he thought he could just leave his whole burnt back to her and expect her not to exact the revenge she so deserves. It's not her fault they got locked out of his parents car while they were at the lake, and it's definitely not her fault Dustin and Lucas had already left with the extra sunscreen, meaning that she's going to be toting the outline of her bathing suit well after the blisters subside and the skin peels away.

(The longer she thinks about it, he's lucky he only gets the one hand, even if it is fingers splayed.)

As soon as she pulls her hand away--where the outline is already rising pink and stark between his shoulderblades--she's on the other side of the room, pushing her laugh into her palm as her doubly wet hair, first from the lake and then from the shower she'd taken when they got back, sways against her neck, sending lightning bolts through her aggravated skin.

"What the hell was that for?" he cries after her, trying and failing to wiggle off the couch to give chase. Instead, he kind of just flops a bit, his joints stiff with precision.

"It's just a sunburn, you big baby," she says to him when he finally gives up and settles for making noises that sound like the litter of puppies that Dustin found under his back porch in tenth grade. She holds her fried arms out first, then waggles one of her matching set legs as if to prove her point. "See?"

"How are you even mobile right now?"

She rolls her eyes, swaying her hips and rolling her shoulders to a silent beat just to make him squirm. It hurts like hell, the red is so deep she's lost sight of most of her freckles, but she knows better than to whine about it. It's not going to make it any better any quicker.

His face pulls back into a pained sneer, and she can see where the bridge of his nose is already warped and peeling. Tough luck. "I can't look at you."

"Yeah, well, that's what I think every morning when I see you in homeroom," she shoots back, hopping from one foot to the other. When he doesn't even deign to fight back, she rolls her eyes again and tucks her shoulders forward. "Whatever, I'll be back."

"Bring me back a Coke?" he yells after her.

She stomps up the staircase without response, her shorts brushing at her pink thighs in a way that makes her hiss under her breath once she's sure she's out of his earshot. 

She ducks the low doorframe at the top of the stairs and pushes out into the main level of the house, her feet smacking across the linoleum as she plots her course toward the kitchen. Grateful for the cool touch of it, she lets it bleed up into the racing stripe outlines left behind from the flip flops she'd discarded at the Wheeler's front door as soon as they'd gotten back and wasn't planning on picking up again until she absolutely had to. 

Going home isn't exactly top of any of her lists these days, but it never really was, was it?

She pads over to the horizontal split fridge/freezer combo and lugs the freezer door open, the thought on her mind. Standing in the rush of cold air, so bitter it curls her toes, she eyes the pickings: early peas and Hungry Man dinners and a box of Fudge Bars whose cost must shake out to less than the $1.25 a piece they all pay at the ice cream truck with gathered quarters from each of their couch cushions.

Funnily enough, she'd always hated Fudge Bars before she came to Hawkins, Orange Creamsicles being her preferred poison. There was nothing better than sitting on a beach in California gnawing on the perfume orange exterior while the seagulls swooped low and the tide rolled in.

There had been a place--no more than a shack, in all honesty--that sold them a dollar a pop, cheaper than anywhere else she could find them. It was a longer walk by all standards, but it was worth it to save the extra fifty cent, even if the place always felt one huff or puff away from collapsing.

She could still remember the way the walls of it would creak when the wind trudged through, and how the girl behind the register would just grin at her and joke about a one way ticket to Oz as she passed her change back. (She could still remember how she would blush when fingertips met her palm and-) the sickly sweet of just shy of melted product would mix with the salt air. Those days Max wouldn't be able to believe there would ever be a day when she wasn't in California.

Things change, though, don't they?

Her hands aren't tacky to the touch with popsicle and ice cream, anymore. (Aren't burnt with wanting or bundled up in confusion around a Creamsicle stick.) There's no salt air unless she happens to catch dinner at one of her friend's homes--Joyce is always the happiest to set another place--and when she hears creaking floorboards her pulse ratchets up her throat, even though it's been more than a couple summers since anything like that was a threat (she doesn't know how Will is still functioning.)

She likes to think it's not all bad. That sure, home is still shitty, but she's got places to go now. In California it was school and the beach and the skatepark until she fell more than she flew. It was anywhere that would take her and her scraped knees and her bruised palms until they decided she had to leave.

Now, it's Mike Wheeler's stupid basement, where she has a seat that's indefinitely hers, and it's Will's kitchen table, where there's always a plate and a cup if she needs it; it's Lucas's front stoop and Dustin's garage where she can find laughter and no questions asked unless she wants them to be. She's got so many friends now, so many places that want her and always will. (That won't cut her strings and throw her on the front lawn if they see the way she hovers over the VHS slip covers with Sigourney or Jodie or Geena before Swayze or Dempsey or Macchio-)

In California, she was smart enough to know how lonely she was, but it wasn't until she got to Hawkins she was wise enough to realize she needed to do something about it.

Do something about it she did, but it wasn't her fault that she'd wormed her way into the most batshit bunch of all.

The phone snaps to life on the far wall of the kitchen, and with it Max jolts back to herself. Her face burns now from the cold she's let seep out of the freezer instead of the long hours in the sun, her hand gripping the door handle so tightly her reddened knuckles are white again. She grabs two Fudge Bars and the bag of peas and slams the door shut. Three great steps deposit her in front of the phone and she unhooks it without thought, knowing it's Dustin and Lucas calling from the payphone on the corner of Maple and Grove to say they're on the way from picking Will up from work.

She breezes through the conversation and attaches the phone back to the hook without a single question of why her words keep sticking in her throat. Blinking twice--once out of habit and once for good measure--she tramps back downstairs to drop the peas atop her handprint on Mike's back and pacify him with the extra Fudge Bar and the knowledge that he'll have Will sitting on the floor in front of him within the quarter hour.

He doesn't say thank you and she doesn't say you're welcome, but they eat their Fudge Bars in companionable silence, and she thinks that she's luckier than the her in California ever would have dreamt she could be.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @foxmulldr !!


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